Statecraft as entertainment: Ars reviews Civilization V

Ars reviews the fifth installment of the Civilization series, and all the …

The date is 4000 BC, and the world is fresh and new—it's about time you started ruling it. Like its predecessors, Civilization V is a turn-based strategy game that takes place in the historical world. You select a civilization from the 18 available to play, including old standbys like the English, French, Germans, or Americans, and some newcomers like the Songhai, led by Askia Muhammad the Great. Then you select a map to play on, and the games drops you into history with little more than a settler for company.

Players build cities on the map, and the hexagonal tiles surrounding each city offer resources like money, food, and production as well as certain specialty resources like iron, wheat, or dyes to support the city's growth. The goal of the game is to work with or against the other civilizations, be they real people or AIs, in order to achieve domination in one of several ways.

You must trade, wheedle, fight, or finesse your way to one of the victory conditions, creating buildings, researching technologies, and constructing Wonders that glorify your cities and your people in pursuit of being the best, happiest, richest, most cultured, or most well-connected civilization on the planet.

The civilization selection screen. Each has a unique benefit, unit, and building.

The goal of the game is straightforward enough, but Civilization V offers many ways to achieve that goal. In the next few sections, we'll discuss some of the features that make Civ5 as addictive, if not more so, than its predecessors.

The look and feel

Civ5 feels polished and well-organized. The streamlined interface pops open notifications and selection boxes as necessary, and slides them away when you're finished. The only interface constants are the minimap and a bar along the top of the screen with some of the game's vital statistics, like the year and your civ's happiness rating.

When nothing is happening, the interface takes up relatively little screen space.

The graphics are significantly improved from the last version, and many small details of the world design make it feel more realistic and fun to watch: the deserts rise and fall in dunes, farms interlock across tiles, fish swim in schools near the coast, and little red foxes frolick on fur resource tiles (even after you build trapping camps). Unlike previous versions, it's prohibitively expensive to build "spaghetti roads" across every tile until your empire is covered with them, so now the roads will run mostly between cities.

The overall design and behavior of the new game feels slightly more cartoonish than Civ4 did, and has a friendlier-looking interface. The game hasn't lost its lighthearted sense of humor—cities will throw "We Love the King!" day if you do something nice for them, and in 2000 BC Goethe or another famous cultural figure might anachronistically publish a list ranking the world's civilizations in categories like "People That Like to Smile the Most" or "People With the Pointiest Sticks."

Some Natural Wonders make an appearance in the game, and discovering them gives your civ a boost.

A few facets of the game that were cartoonish in the past have been refined a bit. In previous versions, diplomacy was conducted with CGI talking heads; now, it is conducted with full screen, mostly half- three-quarter length shots of the appropriate civ leader moving around a royal room of some kind.